News picks
Articles from other sources; copy title, first paragraph, and put URL in body of post.
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Computers have become part of every area of today’s life, becoming constantly more advanced and allow increasingly smaller gadgets to perform more, and more complicated task. The number of inventions in that field has been increasing rapidly, and patent applications for computer implemented inventions has been seen one of the highest growth rates of all fields of technology. The one-day conference is dedicated to exploring the treatment of computer-implemented inventions under patent law in Europe, Japan and the U.S. Renowned experts – Judges, academic and practitioners – from all three jurisdictions will present the case law and praxis of the relevant patent offices and courts in the respective jurisdictions, both with regard to the particularities of obtaining and enforcing patents for computer implemented inventions.
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by:  zoobab 1229590237|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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Both the United States and the European Union are facing demands to modify policies on patents, copyrights and other forms of intellectual property protection, coming from different perspectives. There are high profile right-owner lobbying efforts directed at higher standards and tougher enforcement of intellectual property rights, and growing interest among consumer groups, academics and many innovative businesses to protect the public domain and retain or even expand user rights. There is also much interest in exploring newer approaches to the support of creative and inventive communities, that do not rely on notions of exclusive rights.
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by: zoobab 1229535807|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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Meanwhile, the issue has been resurrected in Europe. Three years after the European Parliament rejected a proposed directive after extraordinarily contentious debate, the EPO President has asked the Enlarged Board of Appeals to determine where and how the line should be drawn on computer programs. The UK Intellectual Property Office has announced an economic study of software patents to provide input to the EPO. There is also vigorous debate in India, centered around patent office interpretation of recent legislation.
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by: zoobab 1229534714|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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"I was evangelizing like Oral Roberts about the importance of IP," Chaikovsky said. "When I got there, Yahoo had six issued patents and 14 applications." When Siino got there four years later, Yahoo was filing about 100 patent applications a year. Now Yahoo is filing 1,000 patent applications a year, Siino said. Although that's not as many as such massive tech companies as Microsoft or Cisco Systems Inc., patent lawyers say it's a big number for Internet companies, which have always been a little allergic to being viewed as tough enforcers of intellectual property.
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by: zoobab 1229526076|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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It's not true that patent infringement suits are going through the roof -- filings have held steady for eight years -- but there are a whole lot more defendants out there looking for lawyers. While many IP litigators have been busier in the past few years, the actual number of infringement suits has hovered between 2,300 and 2,800 a year. But in 2007, the number of defendants named in these cases jumped from around 6,000 in 2006 to 9,000 (see PDF chart; registration required).
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by: zoobab 1229525401|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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Following a recent legal appeal by mobile phone OS vendor (and now Nokia subsidiary), Symbian, the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has just issued a practice note relating to software patentability that, according to patent attorneys, still does not bring the UK fully in line with Europe, in spite of a recent court case that suggested the IPO should change its previous practice. The IPO’s latest practice note means that innovators in the computing technology field continue to face a difficult time at home protecting inventions for which the European Patent Office will grant patents, and which the UK Court of Appeal considers should be patentable.
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by: zoobab 1229520885|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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On 28th February 2008 I handed down my judgment following the trial of this action. The issues decided at trial concerned the validity of Visto's 905 patent and its infringement by a product called the Blackberry Mail Connector. RIM was the overall winner of the issues decided at trial, because it succeeded in revoking the 905 patent on the grounds of obviousness and because it related to a computer program as such. Other attacks launched by RIM, added matter and insufficiency failed.
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by: zoobab 1229517584|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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A report from LWN.net suggests that there may be a patent problem with KSM, a memory management technology that is a candidate for inclusion in a future version of Linux. KSM attempts to extend the idea of sharing memory pages between processes from just managing shared libraries, to any identical memory pages, such as running multiple copies of the same program, or virtualised guest operating systems.
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by: zoobab 1229413744|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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For Microsoft and Google to be taken seriously by Free software advocates, they must begin by combatting software patents. But it won’t happen any time soon and it’s far from sufficient. [...] "Software patents are a huge potential threat to the ability of people to work together on open source. Making it easier for companies and communities that have patents to make those patents available in a common pool for people to use is one way to try to help developers deal with the threat." --Linus Torvalds
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by: zoobab 1229413413|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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Netcraft sued eBay and PayPal for infringement of its patents that cover an "internet billing method." During claim construction, the Western District of Wisconsin found that the limitation of "providing a communications link through equipment of the third party" requires that an infringer "provid[e] customers with internet access." Of course, eBay and PayPal do not provide internet access.
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by: zoobab 1229348667|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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The program is directed to any organizations or individuals dealing with patents, including those developing technology, patent lawyers and trademark and patent office examiners. One way to reduce meritless patents is by soliciting prior art to enable screening of applications. Keith Bergelt, CEO of the program, is convinced that Open Source will benefit from fewer lower quality patents "that might otherwise be used by patent trolls or strategics whose behaviors and business models are antithetical to true innovation and are thus threatened by Linux."
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by: zoobab 1229347379|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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The newest chapter in the ongoing saga of patents-and-Linux tackles the whole issue from an entirely new direction: empowering the process of prior art discovery. It's a smart approach, especially since real patent reform is still years to decades away. To be honest, I expected something like this to spring up in some form or another -- and what's striking is how the idea I'd batted around resembles what the Linux Defenders folks are doing. I'd considered something along the lines of a social-information / Wikipedia-like site, where people could look at dubious patent filings and tag them with prior art references -- either previous patent filings or real-world examples.
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One embodiment is a method of storing video data from a video surveillance system having one or more cameras. Video data is captured from one or more surveillance cameras. Meta-data is automatically generated by performing video analysis on the captured video data from the surveillance cameras. A human operator may manually enter additional meta-data. Attribute data and associated weights, representing information about the relevance of the meta-data, is received. The video data is stored in a hierarchical video storage area; the meta-data, indexed by date and time stamp to the video data, is stored in a meta-data storage area; and the attribute data is stored in an attribute storage area. One or more alerts may be issued based on the past and present meta-data. The video data is secured by encrypting and storing the video data remotely, and audit trails are generated about who and when viewed the video data.
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by: zoobab 1229346799|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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Open Invention Network along with a series of powerful partners ranging from IBM to the Software Freedom Law Center to the Linux Foundation has unveiled Linux Defenders, a federated effort to shield the open source community from patent trolls. The program calls for open source developers large and small to contribute new open source software inventions to the group's attorneys and engineers so that they can help build moats to to keep out people pushing dubious patent infringement charges. Here's why this is a good idea, where the concept has worked very well before.
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by: zoobab 1229346628|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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But this revolution is being threatened by monopolists who wish to control the generation and dissemination of knowledge. Venkatesh Hariharan, Eben, Mishi and Marco gave presentations on the current state of that stupid idea called software patents.Think about this - there are thousands of patents in just one narrow field called “e-commerce”. It is impossible to create any new e-commerce application without “infringing” on multiple patented ideas. In a field like software where innovation is heavily dependent on the mixing-and-matching of ideas, patents are an absurdity.
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Architected to eliminate poor quality patents and ensure that only high quality patents issue, the Linux Defenders program enables individuals and organizations to efficiently contribute to: “Defensive Publications” that codify ‘known’ inventions that have not previously been patented so that they can be brought to the attention of the patent office to ensure that later developed patent…
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Bergelt noted that while the open source community has been good at developing innovation, it hasn't always been as good at codifying that innovation from a legal perspective. Though larger companies like IBM, Red Hat and Novell have been able to patent some of their open source innovations, Bergelt argued that smaller companies and projects have been boxed out of the process.
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Linux Defenders will then also see to it that the publication, duly attributing authorship of the invention to the developer who submitted it, is filed on the IP.com Web site, a database used by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and other patent examiners throughout the world when they are trying to determine whether a proposed patent is truly novel, as any patentable invention is supposed to be.
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by: zoobab 1229344952|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover |
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It is impossible to argue that software code does not employ mathematical influences, because it does. I think Dijkstra’s explanation that a “programmer applies mathematical techniques” is completely true and accurate. Having said this, the fact that mathematical techniques are employed does not as a matter of fact mean that software is mathematical. Under the US patent laws you cannot receive a patent that covers a mathematical equation or a law of nature. You can certainly use mathematical equations and laws of nature as the building blocks to create something that is new and nonobvious that is patentable. So even if software used mathematical equations there would be no prohibition against the patenting of software under a true and correct reading of the US patent laws.
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A case against Microsoft was filed on the 12th of September, after the Prosecution company Paltalk discovered that Microsoft broke one their patents they filed in 1998 with the use of their Xbox Live service. [...] The patent states: Multiplayer games conducted over Wide Area Networks generally involve difficult technical issues because of the requirement that all players have the same view of the game environment in real time. Paltalks technology provides for efficient handling of communications between players necessary to maintain a consistent game environment for all players. Paltalk’s technology covers a number of aspects of online gaming, including communications through a group message server as well as establishing groups for online game play.
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